YouTube alienates amateur users by courting pros, Reuters

Amateur video producers who have been filling YouTube with content for years are seeing views and ad revenue on their clips fall as viewers move to watching professional and better marketed content, this article explains. YouTube’s big push to acquire professional content began a year ago, and in March the company tweaked its algorithm that recommends clips in a way that amateurs felt favoured more professionally produced content. This is good news for the news organisations who do produce slick, professional content, but if it results in fundamentally changing the platform, will it prove as popular?

The newsonomics of Advance’s New Orleans strategy, Nieman Lab

Ken Doctor takes a look at the financial implications of Advance’s move to cut back print days at The Time-Picayune, which has just gone to three days a week. In a time when many newspapers, particularly city papers, are being forced to take tough decisions to make cuts somewhere, Doctor offers a thorough analysis of whether cutting print days is likely to work, considering the cost/revenue numbers, reader and advertising habits, and institutional influence.

This summer’s London Olympics are set to be a time of intense competition – and not just for the athletes involved in the sporting events. Yesterday, Facebook unveiled “Explore London 2012:” its new portal for this summer’s Olympic Games, suggesting that traditional media outlets may be facing increasing competition from social media in their coverage of this year’s Olympics.

Explore London 2012, which Reuters reports took 18 months to develop, is a gateway to other Facebook pages, relating to individual athletes, country teams and sporting events. Users who like the main portal will also see updates from the Olympics in their newsfeeds, and those who like individual pages will also be able to see their posts and pictures from the Games. The whole process allows fans and athletes to communicate directly though posts and comments, rather that working through the medium of a news organisation.

Ingrid Lunden at TechCrunch writes that the link between the Games and Facebook is “not exclusive”. The Games will also have a branded Twitter page (something we have already seen for NASCAR) a portal on Google+ and partnerships with Foursquare, Tumblr and Instragram.

“Little Girl Slaps Mom with Piece of Pizza, Saves Life”

“I Can’t Stop Looking at This Weird Chinese Goat”

“Penguin Shits on Senate Floor”

These are just a few of the SEO-rich headlines that Nieman Lab mentioned a few months ago in an article about Gawker’s strategy to drive more traffic to its site. The ploy isn’t bad; Nieman’s data suggests that these three posts alone generated more than 100,000 page views.

But while penguins and pizza violence might drive a lot of traffic across the web to Gawker, two recent studies suggest that, when it just comes down to Twitter, users prefer plain news from trusted sources.

An article by Megan Garber for The Atlantic reports on a study produced by UCLA and Hewlett-Packard's HP Labs, which suggests that “steadiness -- compelling news expressed in straightforward, not hyperbolic, language -- is actually a component of maximally shareable content.”

Many news organisations, particularly in the US, are investing time and resources in their social media strategies: both how to attract more readers, and how to engage with them more deeply. The latest Pew Research Center report on The State of the News Media in the United States found, however, that the role of social media in directing traffic to news sites was not as large as previously imagined. Nine per cent of Americans ‘very often’ follow news recommendations from Facebook or Twitter, either on computers or mobile devices.